On 2014-11-10 07:32 AM, John Drescher wrote: >> How often does your LTO-6 tape drive need to be cleaned? >> >> I ask because a recent post mentioned every 10 tapes. With my limited tape >> knowledge, that seems rather high, but I have no LTO experience. > > That seems excessive to me although I am still using a dual drive LTO2 > autoloader. For that I run a cleaning cycle 2 times per year for each > of the HP LTO2 tape drives. > > John >
I have an IBM LTO-3 autoloader here. I just have a cleaning cartridge in the reserved slot in the library and I let it take care of itself rather than trying to do it on any sort of schedule. It loads the cleaning cartridge a couple of times a year. I bought this library used - when I first started using it I had to run cleanings every few weeks but they tapered off quite significantly after it had been in use for a while. The research I've done in the past on LTO technology has implied that you should never need to trigger a cleaning cycle on your own - the drive will let you know if it needs it. Cleaning tapes should only be used when the drive requests one. Our bigger library we had in the office ran for years without ever requesting a cleaning. It's worth mentioning that different manufacturers have different cleaning programs in their drives. For instance my IBM drive runs a much shorter cleaning cycle and has about 3-4x more cycles 'allowed' on a cleaning tape versus my HP drive I was using before it. My experience with my limited sample size of a half dozen LTO drives would seem to indicate that the IBM drive requests cleaning more often too. Also worth mentioning - the way your drive is used will have a significant impact on how many cleaning cycles it needs. If you aren't flowing data fast enough to it to keep it streaming at full speed it will build up a lot of cruft on the heads much faster. Bacula can help with this greatly by spooling data before writing, in particular with incremental backups that have many small files scattered all over the disk. Bryn ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
